The EU Accessibility Act and Caption Requirements for Influencer and Brand Video Content

Short answer: the requirement is certain on your own site, unsettled on social

The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has been enforced across the EU since 28 June 2025. It creates a clear caption obligation for video that sits inside your own e-commerce website or app, because e-commerce is one of the services the Act covers, and the accessibility standard e-commerce services must meet (WCAG 2.1 AA, via EN 301 549) itself requires captioning prerecorded video. A video published only on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube — never embedded on your own site — sits in a much less settled legal area, which this article covers honestly instead of guessing.

What the EU Accessibility Act actually covers — and what it doesn't

The EAA was adopted in 2019, had to be transposed into national law by 28 June 2022, and has been enforced in every EU member state since 28 June 2025. It binds private businesses offering a specific list of products and services to EU consumers, regardless of where the business itself is based. Two items on that list matter for a business doing influencer marketing or publishing brand video:

• E-commerce services — your own website or app where a consumer can conclude an online contract.
• Services providing access to audiovisual media services — the apps, players and interfaces used to reach video content, not the video content itself.

That second item is the most common misreading this article exists to correct. Multiple independent legal analyses of the directive are explicit that it covers only access to audiovisual media content — meaning the app or player itself must be accessible and operable with assistive technology — and explicitly not the audiovisual content itself. That content — including the captioning, audio description and sign-language interpretation obligations on TV and streaming services — is governed by a separate law: the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (Directive (EU) 2018/1808), which binds broadcasters and video-on-demand providers, not an ordinary business posting a marketing video.

In other words: the fact that the EAA mentions "audiovisual media services" does not automatically pull every marketing video posted to Instagram or TikTok into its scope. That is exactly the assumption a lot of compliance blogs and captioning-tool vendors make, and it does not survive a closer read of the Act's own scope language.

Where the requirement is certain: your own e-commerce site or app

E-commerce, by contrast, is unambiguously covered. Once your website or app meets the Act's definition of an e-commerce service, it has to meet the Act's accessibility requirements — in practice by conforming to WCAG 2.1 AA (or WCAG 2.2 AA), the standard that EN 301 549 — the technical reference document regulators and courts rely on — is built around. WCAG requires content to be "perceivable, operable, understandable and robust" (the POUR principles), and one of the named, specific success criteria under "perceivable" is 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded) — a Level A requirement, which is therefore always included once a service has to meet Level AA.

In practice, that means: any prerecorded video with speech or relevant sound that lives on your own webshop or app — a product demo on a product page, a hero video on your homepage, an influencer or UGC clip embedded on a campaign landing page — needs captions if your site is to comply with the Act. That's true regardless of where the video was originally shot for, and regardless of who produced it — an influencer, an agency, or your own team. It's the location (your own e-commerce service) that triggers the requirement, not who made the content.

Where it's genuinely unsettled: video that only lives on a social platform

The picture changes for a video that's never placed on your own site — a paid Instagram or TikTok ad, an organic influencer post, a YouTube video that lives only on the channel. Here, the audiovisual-media limb of the Act doesn't reach clearly: it covers only access to audiovisual content (the app or player itself, which Meta, TikTok and YouTube are each responsible for making accessible), not your specific ad or post as content. Claiming that "all marketing video published after 28 June 2025 must be captioned" as a blanket rule therefore overstates what the Act's own access-versus-content distinction actually supports.

Be aware that several commercial captioning vendors and agencies market exactly that broader, unqualified version of the requirement — likely because it sells more captioning subscriptions. Treat that kind of claim with the same caution as any other unverified vendor claim: the broader reading isn't unreasonable as a future direction, but it isn't documented as current law for content that lives only on a social platform.

The micro-enterprise exemption

The Act exempts micro-enterprises — fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance sheet total below €2 million — from the services obligations, including the e-commerce requirement above. That means a very small business can be exempt from the specific e-commerce caption trigger described here even while selling to EU consumers. The exemption covers only service obligations — not product-level requirements elsewhere in the Act, which aren't relevant to video on a website.

Comparison: the EU Accessibility Act vs. the AVMS Directive

Decision framework

IF the video is embedded on your own webshop or app (product page, homepage, campaign landing page) → caption it. That's a real, enforced requirement via the e-commerce rules, regardless of whether the video was originally made for social.

IF the video only ever exists as a paid ad or organic post on a social platform, never embedded on your own site → there's no clearly confirmed requirement from this specific Act today. Captioning is still good practice (see Make Influence's perspective below), but that's a recommendation, not a documented legal duty.

IF you're a micro-enterprise (fewer than 10 employees, under €2 million turnover/balance sheet) → check whether the services exemption applies to you before assuming the e-commerce requirement reaches you.

IF you're an influencer posting your own organic content, not operating an e-commerce service yourself → the Act binds businesses ("economic operators"), not you personally.

Worked example: what closing the gap costs

The figures below are hypothetical and for illustration only — not a documented market price for captioning.

Assume a Danish DTC brand has 40 product videos live on its product pages, none of them currently captioned. If captioning is outsourced at a hypothetical DKK 150 per video, the one-time cost of closing the gap is DKK 6,000 — a single project that's considerably cheaper than discovering the gap during a regulatory inquiry or a complaint from a user with hearing loss. Going forward, the real fix is making captioning a standard production step for every new video, so the backlog never grows again.

What this means for influencer collaborations specifically

It's very common for a brand to take an influencer's or UGC creator's video and place it directly on a product page or landing page — see UGC hooks for ecommerce ads for why that kind of content performs well exactly there. The moment that happens, the video is no longer just a social post — it has become part of your own e-commerce site, and the e-commerce requirement applies regardless of whether the footage was originally shot for Instagram or TikTok. Build a captioning check into your content approval workflow as a standard step before an influencer or UGC video is approved to go on your own site — not only before it's approved to go on the influencer's own post.

It's also worth noting that neither Shopify as a platform, nor an influencer marketing platform's integration with Shopify (see integrations with Shopify, Klaviyo and your CRM), automatically adds captions to a video you upload. That's a separate production step, not something an app integration solves for you.

Make Influence's perspective

Our recommendation is to caption every video with speech or sound, regardless of exactly where today's legal requirement is certain — not because we consider the legal question settled for social content, but because captioning is cheap in practice, makes content usable for the large share of viewers who watch video with the sound off, and is far more expensive to retrofit across 40 old videos at once than to build into every new brief from the start. We don't offer captioning production ourselves as part of our service — this is a general operational recommendation, not a description of what Make Influence provides.

FAQ

Does the Act apply to an influencer's own, organic Instagram post?

Not directly. The Act binds businesses ("economic operators") offering named services such as e-commerce — not an individual posting organic content to their own account.

Does a paid TikTok or Instagram ad that isn't on our own website need captions under this Act?

That isn't clearly confirmed today. The audiovisual-media part of the Act covers access to audiovisual content (the platform's own app), not your specific ad as content — it's the AVMS Directive that regulates TV and VOD content, and that directive targets media service providers, not an ordinary advertiser.

What standard does our webshop need to meet?

In practice, WCAG 2.1 AA (or WCAG 2.2 AA), the reference point EN 301 549 and courts use for the Act's requirement that a service be "perceivable, operable, understandable and robust."

Are small businesses exempt?

Micro-enterprises — fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in annual turnover or balance sheet — are exempt from the services obligations, including the e-commerce requirement. The exemption covers services only, not other parts of the Act.

Is this the same as the DSA's or GDPR's rules?

No. the EU DSA's ad transparency rules are about who paid for an ad and why you're seeing it — not about whether video is accessible to people with hearing loss. GDPR is about handling personal data. All three are separate pieces of EU law that can apply to the same campaign at once.